Canetti recorded those charged words during the fiercest years of the Second World War. Fully aware of concentration camps and firebombings and the other horrors that had swept over Europe, Canetti turned his attention away from human savagery toward another holocaust: the destruction of the natural world. He had spent his youth in Bulgaria, where his earliest memories were of housemaids’ tales of werewolves and vampires. Wolves had once beset his mother as she crossed the ice-covered Danube in a troika, and for years afterward she suffered nightmares about their red tongues and white fangs. Canetti, we may suspect, sympathized with the wolves, and he recognized that when their howling came ever more seldom from the hills outside Ruschuk to his open window, the world would change for the worse.

It did, and to those who arrogantly proclaim that humans are the alpha and omega of existence, Canetti would later say, “It turns out that we are actually God’s lowest creature, that is to say, God’s executioner in his world.”

As a species, Homo sapiens has indeed acted as an executioner in the world. At the same time, humans have tried, however imperfectly, to understand nature and our place in it. Our history accords animals too little, but our literatures, our folktales and mythologies, do not. They are full of stories about animals, full of moralizing and speculation, full of the most outlandish exaggeration and the most profound sympathy. Elements of all these tendencies occur in the apocryphal classification of animals ascribed to the Chinese Tai Ping Kuan Chi:

(1) Those Belonging to the Emperor; (2) Embalmed; (3) Tame; (4) Suckling Pigs; (5) Sirens; (6) Fabulous; (7) Stray Dogs; (8) Included in the Present Classification; (9) Frenzied; (10) Innumerable; (11) Drawn with a Very Fine Camelhair Brush; (12) Et Cetera; (13) Having Just Broken the Water Pitcher; and (14) That From a Long Way Off Look Like Flies.

As the French philosopher Michel Foucault observes, “In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitations of our own.”

Our systems of thought may be limited, but that is part of their charm. An animal perceived by a Chinese scholar of the tenth century AD is not the same animal as one perceived by a modern naturalist, head full of thoughts on ecosystemic patches, energy-transfer patterns, speciation, stochasticity—and rates of extinction. Even among our contemporaries, to say nothing of observers widely distributed in time, you will find a considerable diversity of opinion on the same animals, the same events. The differences are even greater among cultures, as Bertrand Russell notes: “Animals studied by Americans rush about frantically, with an incredible display of hustle and pep, and at last achieve the desired result by chance. Animals observed by Germans sit still and think, and at last evolve the solution out of their inner consciousness.” The authors of Talmud make much the same point, saying, “We see things not as they are, but as we are.”

The differences in perception do nothing to diminish our long-standing interest, as a species, in the animals that inhabit our world. If we take the beginnings of literature to be the paintings that Neolithic peoples left on Old World cave walls, we will see that animals were our first concern as writers, as keepers of memory. In the same way, our alphabets evolved as a means of counting sheep—and camels, and bulls, and geese—the letterforms changing from pictograph to stylized symbol, but always carrying within them their origins in the description of the natural world: A as in Aardvark, Z as in Zebra.

This interest remains a human constant. The anthropologist Christopher Crocker wisely observes, “People are intensely interested in the animals that live around them, and along with that interest and fascination comes the desire to make other living things participants in what the humans are doing . . . through the metaphoric process.” That metaphoric process ranges throughout our literature. In its ancient expression, in the fables of Aesop and indigenous stories the world over, animals serve as moral exemplars, as reminders against gluttony and sloth and envy, as counters toward an ethic of the common wealth and lives well lived.

In late antiquity and the Middle Ages, that moral direction continued, but in such works as the Historia Naturalis of Pliny and the Quaestiones Naturales of Adelard we also see a movement toward describing animals not only as markers in the great chain of being—lower than humans, to be sure—but also as things that exist in and of themselves, a movement that culminated in great medieval bestiaries that continue to exercise an influence, however subtle, on the way we conduct our studies of natural history today. This account of the unicorn—the rhinoceros, that is—by the thirteenth-century encyclopedist Richard de Fournival shows a profound attention to the fabulous, without a hint of science:

Such is the Unicorn’s nature that it is more cruel and difficult to catch than any other beast; and on its forehead it has a horn no armor can resist. So none dares to track and lie in wait for it, save only a young virgin. For when it has discovered a maiden by her scent, it kneels before her with sweet humility, as if to serve her. Hunters who know the Unicorn therefore place a young maid in its path, and it falls asleep in her lap. Then they, who dare not face it while awake, come and kill it.

Is the rhinoceros cruel? Almost certainly not, we would say today, careful to avoid the cardinal sin of anthropomorphism and bent on giving each animal its proper due in creation, trusting that each came to inhabit its corner of the world for some good reason. (It is hard, even the largest-spirited of naturalists and saints agree, to understand what part gnats, sandflies, and Chihuahuas play in the greater schemes of God and of evolution.) The natural history of our times, having been filtered through the growth of so-called hard science after the Middle Ages, is more self-critical, more aware of blind spots in human observation, more charged with a scientific spirit that doubtless will seem to future generations shot through with a mythopoeia all its own.

We see things not as they are, but as we are. Thus this story from the Greek Aesopica:

A man and a lion were traveling together through forested mountains. To pass the time, they began to boast to each other of their strength and agility. They argued back and forth for many miles, until they came to an abandoned temple with a stone statue before it depicting an athlete strangling a lion.

The man pointed it out and said, “You see! We humans are the strongest creatures on earth.”

The lion answered, “A human made this statue. If lions could sculpt, it would tell an entirely different story.”

***

It is universal among human cultures to use animals to explain the way things are. And things are the way they are, our literatures continue, because the animals, working in concert with the gods, have made them so. A White Mountain Apache flood myth illustrates this point.

Long, long ago The People were living on this earth. Tanager came to them and said that the ocean was going to come over the land and cover all their homes. Tanager came to where two boys were living with their mother and told them they must weave a great big basket so that they could hide within it when the ocean came and save themselves. Tanager went to the other camps and told The People to make big baskets, too. But they did not believe him, and they did nothing. Only the two boys did as Tanager said. Tanager told them to seal the mouth of the basket with a rock once they had got inside.

The sea covered all the land. The brothers were inside their big basket. The People who did not believe Tanager ran to the brothers’ basket, but there was no room for them. They drowned in that water.

Now the water sank into the ground. Tanager set the basket down beside a river. The brothers came out. The earth was different. The mountains and trees and plants and stones had all been washed away, and the country was level and sandy. Nothing could grow on it.

Then Bear came along. “I hear you are starving,” he said. “I have lots of food,” he said to those people. He shook himself and out of him fell xuctco’; he shook himself again and out fell xucdilko.he, then xucntsazi, then xucts’ise, all kinds of edible cacti. He shook himself and out came yucca fruit, piñon nuts, juniper berries, manzanita berries, tc’idnk’u.je or sumac, gadts’agi or juniper, and ‘id’a.dilko or acorns.

All these things that Bear gave us are the same ones that grow on the earth today.

We need to eat: that is the foremost issue, to humans, of the way things are. The Kalahari San tell a story that suggests their regard for animals with the utilitarian eye of a hunting people; it is perhaps not for the squeamish.

Pishiboro, the chief Bushmen deity, was married to an elephant. One day, Pishiboro’s brother murdered this elephant wife while delousing her, then built a fire, cut off one of her breasts, and roasted it, eating it from his perch atop her corpse. Pishiboro came upon this scene and was about to slay his brother for his crime, but his brother said, “Hey, stupid! All this time you have been married to meat, and you thought of her as a wife!” Pishiboro pondered this remark and then helped himself to some of the meat, seeing that the brother was correct.

***

“Animals are our friends,” the aptly named comedian Bobcat Goldthwait bellows in performance. “They just won’t pick us up at the airport.” The poet of Ecclesiastes reminds us, more earnestly, of this amity:

That which happens to men also happens to animals; and one thing happens to them both: as one dies so dies the other, for they share the same breath; and man has no preeminence above an animal: for all is vanity. All go to one place; all are made of dust, and all return to dust again.

On occasion, when the interests of humans and animals collide, the amity dissolves, and animals become our enemies. But such occurrences are surprisingly rare in the world’s library of animal stories.

When we tell stories about animals, we are usually telling stories about ourselves. Those stories contain hidden messages, imparting cultural truths that an outsider can easily miss. “A lion, though he is king of the beasts, is harassed by the tiny tail of the scorpion, and the poison of desert snakes kills him immediately.” Thus a Byzantine bestiary, reporting on the lions of Ethiopia—but also, I think, admonishing the reader to beware the sin of pride, of feeling oneself to be a lord in the world. (The text, unhelpfully, goes on to tell us that lions fear only one thing in the world, and that is an albino rooster.)

More often, our stories in which animals are really humans are more transparent; you have only to glance at George Orwell‘s Animal Farm to see the scowling face of Joseph Stalin. Animals are the foils by which we deliver unpleasant news about our own behavior, as an unveiled story from Aristotle’s Rhetoric shows. In it, Aristotle credits the fabulist Aesop for having defended a corrupt politician of Corinth by telling his story “The Fox and the Hedgehog”: A hedgehog, taking pity on a flea-infested fox, asked whether he could remove the vermin with his quills. The fox replied, “No, these fleas are full of blood, so they no longer bother me. If you take them off, fresh fleas will come.” So, Aesop said to the jury, if this man is removed from office, a new one will come along and rob the city all over again. The jury was unappreciative, and sentenced Aesop to die for having spoken so plainly. He somehow escaped, and went on to tell his pointed stories elsewhere.

* * *

They feed us, resemble us, beguile us. Animals also teach us how to live in the world, conveying the moral and ethical truths of cultures from one generation to another. I am particularly fond of this gentle lesson on etiquette, again from the Aesopica:

A bear from the far north decided to go off and see the world, and it roamed south, visiting many strange kingdoms. One day he came to a pond and saw a flock of birds drinking. Seeing that they raised their heads after every sip, he stopped to ask why. “We do it to thank the heavens for giving us water,” one bird told the bear.

The bear laughed and called them superstitious. A rooster came up to the bear and said, “You are a stranger, and so we forgive your impolite behavior. You may not share our beliefs, but it is rude to say so when you are our guest.”

We are the guests of the animals in this world, and our literatures—if not our histories—are rich with our gratitude.